How Amazon is building substations, laying fiber and generally doing everything to keep cloud costs down

If there’s anyone still left wondering how it is that large cloud providers can keep on rolling out new features and lowering their prices even when no one is complaining about them, Amazon Web Services Vice President and Distinguished Engineer James Hamilton spelled out the answer in one word during a presentation Thursday at the company’s re:Invent conference: Scale.

Scale is the enabler of everything at AWS. To express the type of scale he’s talking about, Hamilton noted an oft-cited statistic — that AWS adds enough capacity every day to power the entirety of Amazon.com when was it was a $7 billion business. “In fact, it’s way bigger than that,” he added. “It’s way bigger than that every day.”

Seven days a week, the global cycle of building, testing, shipping, racking and deploying AWS’s computing gear “just keeps cranking,” Hamilton said. AWS now has servers deployed in nine regions across the world…